Pretention

PRETENTION, French law. The claim made to a thing which a party believes
himself entitled to demand, but which is not admitted or adjudged to be his.
2. The words rights, actions and pretensions, are usually joined, not
that they are synonymous, for right is something positive and certain,
action is what is demanded, while pretention is sometimes not even
accompanied by a demand.

I think this is because the polarity of cliched pretention and down-homeyness is only one of the image's frictions; there is also the endearing stupidity of the gesture described, and, most of all, the tenderness of the work's realization, its sweet and delicate color--it is a drawing in crayon and ink-evoking a page from the loveliest coloring book you ever had, if only you could color.

He also examines critical episodes that uncover the inherent conflict in the relationship: a chapter on "The Public World of Revolt and Submission" which centers upon Ghent's mid-fifteenth-century rebellion which established a regime that aggressively embraced the town's traditional privileges of citizenship; another, "The New Public Order," again dissects a rebellion, this time in Ghent in 1539, the outcome of which definitively quashed civic pretentions to autonomy.

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